


The Fairy Ring

by acuteneurosis



Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood Friends, Folklore, Gen, Kidnapping, Modern Era, fae
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29095704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acuteneurosis/pseuds/acuteneurosis
Summary: Nora doesn't believe in magic. And she's not about to hope for a fairy tale ending. She knows how those end up, thank you very much.
Relationships: Nora & Kaylee
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	The Fairy Ring

**Author's Note:**

> Another of my older pieces, one of my first doing some world-building for an urban fantasy setting with fae characters.

“I swear I’m going to kill you!” Kaylee screamed, waving the tube of lipstick in Nora’s face.

“You were the one who said I had to take your purse because my bag didn’t match,” Nora protested, holding her hands up to fend her roommate off. “It’s just lipstick.”

“My Mac! This color was discontinued! Do you have any idea how much I paid for it? Seventy. Dollars.”

Nora looked at the gritty, violent red nub and the picture of Disney’s animated Cruella de Vil on the tube and bit her lip to not comment on how tacky seventy dollars of lipstick apparently was. “You can get more red lipstick.”

“This is Heartless. I told you, it’s discontinued. And you used the whole tube to draw a lousy circle on the ground. A stupid magic circle!”

“You didn’t have anything else in your purse,” Nora tried to defend herself.

“Then use your own damn blood! Seventy. Dollars.”

The words stung, not just because Kaylee was accidentally right and Nora would have had better odds of stumbling into magic if she had used blood, especially her own, to try and make a protective ward. It was more the memory of the evening before that was really blocking her ability to think straight and deal with the problem in front of her.

Not her damn blood, but his damned blood. That was what Aunt Eireen had called it, after Brian had disappeared. Not that he could help it, Aunt Eireen had allowed with a depreciating shrug. It was his father’s fault, and his mother’s, for having been involved with his father. But she wasn’t really at fault either. If you didn’t know how to protect yourself, it was easy to fall victim to one of the fair folk.

Not that anyone besides Aunt Eireen believed in that sort of thing anymore. Nora only wore the iron bracelet her aunt had given her, shaped like rowan branches and four-leaf clovers, because she thought it was pretty. And it was a good conversation piece when she had to try and be social with other people in the folklore program.

“You aren’t even hurt,” Kaylee grumbled. “You don’t answer your texts all night long, you ruined my lipstick, and you don’t even have the decency to have had a real emergency.”

“I thought it _was_ an emergency. That’s why I tried to draw a… magic… circle.” Nora rubbed her forehead, wishing that she did have some sign that everything had actually played out the way she remembered last night. It was too unbelievable otherwise.

“I just don’t get it,” Kaylee said, leaning back and staring at her ruined lipstick with narrow eyes. “You don’t believe in this stuff. You say so all the time. So why’d you do it?”

Nora had to pause and think through the words before she could manage to say them. Because everything that had happened still seemed like a terrible dream. “I saw Brian last night.”

It took Kaylee several seconds to process that. “What? That boy you knew when you were a kid. The one who got kidnapped?”

“We don’t know what actually happened to him,” Nora corrected, then added, “Well, we didn’t know. I still don’t really know. He didn’t exactly explain.”

Which was a lie. He had explained it quite simply just the night before. “My dad came to get me,” he had told her. “So I went with him.”

Which wasn’t too far-fetched, as far as stories went. Brian had been wanting to meet his father for a long time. Any stranger that would have offered to take the position would have been welcome. And apparently someone had come to claim the title. So away Brian had gone. Without telling his mother or anyone else. Which had caused a bit of an uproar. And Aunt Eireen to swear she had always known he was one of the folk from under the hill.

The hill that had been just outside of the small northwest Illinois town, population 2,000 very nosey neighbors, thank you very much. The hill that had been a fun place to play, but Aunt Eireen had insisted was home to the wee folk that had tried, somewhat like their human counterparts, to see if the land of the free would liberate them from the Underland of their mother country. The sparse ring of white oaks at the top of the hill was fun to explore and climb all over, but Nora had also always been home before dark, which had been when Aunt Eireen said she would be carried away if she weren’t careful.

Except for the night Brian had gone missing.

“So what did he say to you?” Kaylee asked, jabbing the lipstick at Nora. She took a step back, collapsing onto their couch and staring up at the ceiling.

“Not much, really. He didn’t recognize me at first. I don’t think he expected to see me there.”

“Sweetie, I can’t see you at a pub, and I’ve known you since you were legal. You really went to a pub? Seriously?”

“It was called The Fairy Ring,” Nora mumbled.

“Who in their right mind names a pub The Fairy Ring? Shouldn’t it be something more manly, like… The Green Man.”

“Or The Irish Wolfhound?” Nora suggested dryly, smiling a little now. “I know. That’s why I wanted to check it out.”

Kaylee paused, took a seat on the arm of the couch and started tapping the lipstick tube against the wall. “So, I know you like fake things,” she said, drawing out each word. “You’re getting a freaking masters in folk stuff, and you spend all your free time reading about little people.”

“Folklore isn’t just about fake things,” Nora said, glaring at her friend.

“Yeah, but all the work you do is. And I don’t mind. It’s just…” Kaylee spread her hands and Nora saw in that gesture the months of isolation she had spent classifying fair folk by Scottish and Irish origins, the collection of small knickknacks in her room that were miniature fairies and protective symbols, the pot of clover that she tended to try and harvest a four leaf charm from, and last night’s random attempt to solve her problems by hoping magic was real.

“Okay,” she conceded. “I might have a bit of a problem.”

“Uh, yeah. You went bat eyed crazy last night, didn’t contact me for twelve hours, and you owe me a seventy dollar tube of lipstick. I’d say that’s a pretty serious problem for you. Oh, and you’re crushing on a guy you knew when you were like, six.”

“I was nine,” Nora replied defensively. “We were best friends for six years. And I don’t have a crush on Brian.”

Crush implied romantic interest. And Nora’s interest was not romantic. No matter how cute she remembered him being as a child, no matter how well he had grown into tall, golden blonde, bright green-eyed manhood, Nora was not interested. Because when you spend so much time living in legends, you really understand the idea of too good to be true.

And finding Brian again was way too good to be true. Him remembering her was a blatant warning. And the look on his face when he had found her down the street from the pub, tucked around the corner of a building and standing in a circle drawn in violent red lipstick. That was just unbelievable.

“So it’s an obsession,” said Kaylee.

“No.”

Yes. It had always been an obsession. That’s why she had gone to the hill, to the tree ring, the night he had disappeared to beg the fairies to give him back, staying there all night and terrifying her aunt and mother the next morning. That’s why she had pestered Brian’s mother and the police about when they’d find him for three years after he had gone. It was probably even why she had gone to a stupid pub called The Fairy Ring when she was more than old enough to have known better.

What was scary, more scary than an obsession that had apparently followed her from her delusional childhood, was that he had been there.

And his eyes. And the unearthly look on his face when he had come after her.

“Denial isn’t going to help you,” Kaylee pointed out, tapping Nora on the nose. Nora batted at the hand, remembering something similar Brian had said.

“You don’t need to pretend you don’t believe. It doesn’t change the truth.”

The truth was that she had spotted him across the room at the pub, laughing with a bunch of strangers, and she had recognized him immediately. The truth was he had noticed her, unable to stop staring but too afraid to go up and ask him, and he had come to talk to her. The truth was that it had been him, and he had been unreal, inhuman, under the dim lights and beyond the light haze of alcohol that she rarely indulged in. The truth was he had been standing too close, but he had pulled away when he had seen her bracelet, so she had left in a hurry on a lame excuse.

“I don’t need help,” Nora objected. Nothing really bad had actually happened. It had only seemed like it was happening. The contrast of bringing up old times with this new creature she didn’t quite believe in. His familiar smiles in opposition to the cool observation in his eyes. The stifling oppression of the pub suddenly becoming the mysterious exposure of the empty street outside.

In the dark of that night, magic had seemed very real.

“Why are you running?” Brian had asked her, catching up with her in the dark alley grinning at the circle she had tried to draw around her, to keep him out and hide herself. He had held out his hand to her, inviting, like he was offering to take her away from everything she knew. And she had stood there silently, shivering like an idiot, breathing shallow and fast, and holding a Cruella de Vil lipstick tube in her hand.

Heartless. And he had told her it didn’t change the truth, and had stepped into her circle, and she had fainted. And when she had woken up, still in that circle, and there was no one else around, she could almost hear her aunt next to her, scolding Nora for getting caught in the mind games of the fair folk.

Nora would like to believe she heard someone nearby stand up and walk away, as if they had been watching over her. Maybe even Brian. But the truth was she didn’t know. She had just come home to a terribly worried roommate who had quickly morphed into a terrifying roommate at the sight of the lipstick.

It wasn’t Brian’s mother’s fault, Aunt Eireen had said, that she fell for the fair folk’s tricks. That she had been trapped in their world. Maybe it wasn’t Nora’s fault either. Maybe they had taken her away that night she had gone to look for Brian, trapped in the fairy ring at the top of the hill.

And maybe, last night, she had found him and the way out.

“Well, the only thing that’s going to help you now,” Kaylee said firmly, grinning a bit, “is replacing my lipstick. Otherwise, I promise, you will be on a one-way trip to another world, and no one will ever find you again.”


End file.
